As the profound influence of certain kinds of literature on
existential philosophy suggests, the impulse of the Western writer
to refuse to fulfill causal expectations, to refuse to provide
'solutions' for the 'crime' of existence, historically precedes
the existential critique of Westernism. We discover it in say,
Euripides' Orestes, Shakespeare's problem plays, the tragic-comedies
of the Jacobeans, Wycherley's The Plan Dealer, Dickens's
Edwin Drood, and more recently in Tolstoy's The Death
of Ivan Ilych, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground,
Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Kafka's The Trial, Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author and even in T.S.
Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes. (These are works, it is worth
observing, the radical temporality of which does not yield readily
to the spatial methodology of the New Criticism, which has its
source in the iconic art of Symbolist modernism.) In Notes
from Underground, for example, Dostoevsky as editor 'concludes'
this anti-novel:

The 'notes' of this paradoxalist do not end here. However, he
could not resist and continued them. But it also seems to be
that we may stop here.

Taking their lead from the existentialists, the postmodern absurdists-writers
like the Sartre of Nausea and No Exit, the Beckett
of Watt and the Molloy trilogy as well as Waiting for
Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape (the titles
should not be overlooked), Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Frisch, Sarraute,
Pynchon, etc.-thus view the well-made play or novel (la piéce
bien faite), the post-Shakespearian allotrope of the Aristotelian
form, as the inevitable analogue of the well-made positivistic
universe delineated by the post-Renaissance humanistic structure
of consciousness. More specifically, they view the rigid deterministic
plot of the well-made fiction, like that of its metaphysical counterpart,
as having its source in bad faith.

It is, therefore, no accident that the paradigmatic archetype
of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story
(and its anti-psychoanalytical analogue), the formal purpose of
which is to evoke the impulse to 'detect' and/or to psychoanalyze
in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime
(or find the cause of neurosis).

What I am suggesting is that it was the recognition of the
ultimately 'totalitarian' implications of the Western structure
of consciousness-of the expanding analogy that encompasses art,
politics, and metaphysics in the name of the security of rational
order-that compelled the postmodern imagination to undertake the
deliberate and systematic subversion of plot-the beginning, middle
and end structure-which has enjoyed virtually unchallenged supremacy
in the Western literary imagination ever since Aristotle or, at
any rate, since the Renaissance interpreters of Aristotle claimed
it to be the most important of the constitutive elements of literature.
In the familiar language of Aristotle's Poetics, then,
the postmodern strategy of de-composition exists to generate rather
than to purge pity and terror; to disintegrate, to atomize rather
than to create a community.

We have seen during the twentieth century the gradual emergence
of an articulate minority point of view-especially in the arts-that
interprets Western technological civilization as a progress not
towards the Utopian polis idealized by the Greeks, but
towards a rationally mass produced City which, like the St Petersburg
of Dostoevsky's and Tostoy's novels, is a microcosm of universal
madness. This point of view involves a growing recognition of
one of the most significant paradoxes of modern life: that in
the pursuit of order the positivistic structure of consciousness,
having gone beyond the point of equilibrium, generates radical
imbalances in nature which are inversely proportional to the intensity
with which it is coerced. However, it has not been able to call
the arrogant anthropomorphic Western mind and its well-made universe
into serious question.

As I have suggested, this is largely because the affirmative
formal strategy of Symbolist modernism was one of the religio-aesthetic
withdrawal from existential time into the eternal simultaneity
of essential art. The Symbolist movement, that is, tried to deconstruct
language, to drive it out of its traditional temporal orbit-established
by the humanistic commitment to kinesis and utility and
given its overwhelming socio-literary authority, as Marshall McLuhan
has shown, by the invention of the printing press-in order to
achieve iconic or, function in order to disintegrate the reader's
linear-temporal orientation and to make him see synchronically-as
one sees a painting or a circular mythological paradigm-what the
temporal words express. In other words, its purpose was to reveal
(in the etymological sense of 'unveil') the whole and by so doing
raise the reader above the messiness or, as Yeats calls the realm
of existence in 'Phases of the Moon,' 'that raving tide,' into
a higher and more permanent reality.

This impulse to transcend the historicity of the human condition
in the 'allatonceness' (the term McLuhan's) of the spatialized
work of Symbolist literary art is brought into remarkably sharp
focus when one perceives the similarity between the poetic implicit
in W.B. Yeats's 'Sailing to Bzyantium' with Stephen Dedalus's
aesthetic of stasis in Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, which as often been taken, especially by the New Critics,
as a theoretical definition of modern Symbolist literary form:

You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic
emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings
excited by improper art are kinetic, desire and loathing. Desire
urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to
abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions.
The arts which excite them, pornographical ordidactic, are therefore
improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term)
is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire
and loathing.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

For Stephen, growing up has been a terrible process of discovering
the paradox that the City-for Plato, for Virgil, for Augustin,
for Justinia, for Dante, for Plethon, for Campanella, the image
of beauty, of order, of repose-has become in the modern world
the space of radical ugliness and disorder. To put it in Heidegger's
terms, it has been a process of discovering that the at-home of
the modern world has in fact become the realm of the not-at-home.
This process, that is, ahs been one of dislocation. Thus
for Stephen the ugliness and disorder, the 'squalor' and 'sordidness,'
that assault has sensitive consciousness after his 'Ptolemaic'
universe (which he diagrams on the fly-leaf of his geography book)
has been utterly shattered during the catastrophic and traumatic
Christmas dinner, is primarily or, at any rate, ontologically,
a matter of random motion:

He sat near them [his numerous brothers and sisters] at the
table and asked where his father and mother were. One answered:
-Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.
Still another removal! A boy named Fallon in Belvedere had often
asked him with a silly laugh why they moved so often
He asked:
-Why are we on the move again, if it's a fair question?
The sister answered:
-Becauseboro theboro landboro lorbobo willboro putbobo usboro
outboro
He waited for some moments, listening [to the children sing 'Oft
in the Stilly Night'], before he too took up the air with them.
He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtones of weariness
behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they set
out on life's journey they seemed weary already of the way.
All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. And he
remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken
line of Virgil giving utterance, liket he voice of Nature
herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things
which has been the experience of her children in every time.

(Walter Pater too had heard this sad Virgilian note and in
quoting the passage in Marius the Epicurean, another novel
having its setting in a disintegrating world, established the
nostalgia for rest as the essential motive of the aesthetic movement
in England.)

Seen in the light of his discovery that random motion is the
radical category of modern urban life-that existence is prior
to essence, which the postmodern writer will later present as
the Un-Naming in the Garden-City-Stephen's well-known aesthetic
or rather (to clarify what persistent critical reference to Stephen's
'aesthetic' has obscured) his iconic poetics of stasis, both its
volitional ground and its formal character, becomes clear. he
wants, like T.E. Hulme, like Proust, like Virginia Woolf and like
most other Symbolists, a poetry the iconic-and autotelic-nature
of which arrests the mind-neutralizes the anguish, the
schism in the spirit-and raises it above desire and loathing,
which is to say, the realm of radical motion, of contingency,
of historicity, in the distancing moment when the whole is seen
simultaneously.